Writing Whales: Indigenous Knowledges and Resistance in People of the Whale

• In Event: Imperial and Decolonial Waters: Knowledge, Dissent, Climate Justice

Abstract

Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) discursively establishes America as ruling the oceans on the surface, a textual gesture of dethroning the British Empire of the Seas when the narrator Ishmael tells readers that “these naked Nantucketers, [have] overrun and conquered the watery world like so many Alexanders; […] two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer’s. For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires” (Ch. 14). Not only does this passage condone British imperialism and American expansionism on land (e.g. the annexation of Mexico in 1848), but it also condones the imperial notion of rule over oceans. It foreshadows American expansion into the Pacific and annexation of several islands and archipelagoes (e.g. Guam, American Samoa, Marshal Islands, Hawaii) that hugely enlarged American claims to Pacific ocean space and its resources. This imperialist claim to oceans is inseparable from the appropriated right to hunt whales and the extractivist exploitation of their oil. Captain Ahab’s obsessive whale hunt not only stands for obsessive capitalist exploitation of a resource but also for a fanatical megalomania and the claim to rule over ship, crew, whales, and the oceans – an American obsessiveness with national and international domination that we witness today again in full force.
Four years after the publication of Moby Dick, the U.S. and the Makah Tribe signed the Treaty of Neah Bay, granting the Makah “[t]he right of taking fish and of whaling and sealing at usual and accustomed grounds and stations…”, while they ceded most of their traditional lands on the Olympic Peninsula. In the 1920s the Makah and Nuu-chah-nulth gave up hunting whales since American commercial hunting had reduced the North Pacific gray whale and humpback population almost to extinction. The Makah exercised their treaty right to hunt a great whale for the first time again in 1999, against scathing protest of animal-rights groups. It is a historical irony that exhaustive American whaling caused the species decline with following cultural and physical deterioration of whaling cultures, while now settler American animal rights activists impose Euro-American understandings of environmentalism and species protection on Indigenous populations that still suffer from colonization, dispossession, and assimilation policies. This is the historical and cultural background for People of the Whale (2008) by Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan, which centers on the fictional A’aitska whaling culture modelled after the Makah with a plot about the struggles over whaling, whaling rights, and food sovereignty.
This paper will read both novels together to study their representation of oceans and whales, extractive and colonial violence, marine knowledges and ecological understandings, human-non-human interrelations, and resistance struggles that focus on food and water sovereignty.

Author

• Kerstin Knopf, U Bremen